Wither
by Concept101
Summary: "A pair of familiar eyes stared widely back at him. And it was at that moment, Harry finally realised, that he had never been free." A dark spin on the last chapter of the Deathly Hallows, 'Nineteen Years Later'. One Shot! Complete!


Harry kept smiling and waving, in spite of his insides twisting with sorrow as the train rounded a corner and disappeared from the sight. The last traces of the steam spewing from the train disappeared, carrying his children with it and he felt Ginny's hand on his shoulder.

"They'll be alright"

"I know they will." he replied absentmindedly, "Let's go home"

They said their goodbyes to Ron and Hermione, making idle promises to see each other at dinner on Sunday, and holding each other's hands, they apparated together back to their house on a little street in the village of Godric's Hollow.

Harry's deeply ingrained instincts instantly marked the three witches staring at them out of the windows of their thatched cottages on the street and the five muggles walking about in the street, and then promptly dismissed them as threats.

Such was the curse of being what he was . . . living in constant fear . . . a never ending paranoia, forever chipping away at the edges of his remaining sanity.

Harry opened the iron wrought gate and let himself into the house premises, carefully avoiding the tendrils of the thorny hedges that separated the little garden in front of the house from the street further in front of it. He'd have to trim the hedges soon, he thought to himself, staring at the thorns on the bushes.

"Are you coming Harry?" Ginny called from the threshold of the house, pulling Harry's attention back from the hedges. She had gotten the door open, and was holding it ajar, waiting for him to come through.

Harry nodded, headed up the small flight of stairs up to the door, and let himself in, taking hold of the door from Ginny, who headed into the house as Harry closed the door and reapplied all of the privacy and protection charms that he liked to have on the door.

Finishing up the _Protego Horriblis_ with one final wave, Harry turned back and headed deeper into the bowels of the house. His neck was feeling particularly stiff today, he idly noted and wondered why.

Kneading his neck to relieve himself from some of the uncomfortable sensation, he made his way into the kitchen, where Ginny was taking out the coloured contact lenses from her eyes and putting them into their cases, revealing her true ocular colour.

Harry stared at those red eyes, and with a sharp spike of hatred, a memory of a night long past made its way into his head.

 _It was the night of the New Years, and all was merry._

 _Little Lily was fast asleep in her spot in James's arms, who was just as asleep as his youngest sibling. Albus was lost in the realm of dreams too, curled up in the loveseat beside the fire, all warm and_ _cosy_ _._

 _"They wanted to stay up for the fireworks" Ginny muttered to him with a smile, sipping on her wine as she rested her head on Harry's shoulder._

 _Harry gently played with her fiery hair as he replied with a fond smile of his own, "I know. But I don't want to wake them up. We could watch the fireworks ourselves and show them in that new pensieve Luna gifted us."_

 _"Hmm. We could," she replied, and Harry could feel her breathing increase in pace as her hand crept down and slid inside his shirt, "And just like that we seem to have opened up a few hours in our schedule. What would you like to do with those free hours Mr Potter?"_

 _Harry playfully pulled Ginny flush against himself before whispering throatily into her ear, "I think you know exactly what I would like to do Mrs Potter"_

 _Ginny turned her head to face him, and with a sly grin, Harry bent back her head across his arm and kissed her, slowly at first, and then deepening it with a swift gradiation of intensity, until the world around them dissolved and all that existed for each of them was the other._

 _"Bedroom" she muttered breathlessly as they finally parted, glancing at the children. Acquiescing, Harry lifted her off her feet, and captured her lips with his own to stifle to shrill squeak that almost escaped out of her._

 _With a few long strides, they reached the bedroom. Harry threw open the door, uncaring of any noise he was making, before he tossed his wife playfully onto the bed and pounced on her. A flick of his wand left both of them bare as the day they were born, and within seconds, they were joined in the most intimate of ways, moving as one with an animalistic fervour._

 _A few wild seconds passed before their bodies, perfectly synchronised with each other, started to move, intending to switch places with each other._

 _It was in that moment that it all went to hell._

 _Ginny's hand hit the Pensieve that was resting on the lamp table beside the bed, upturning the runic vessel and drenching them both with whatever mysterious magical liquid that the ancient device used._

 _"Sheesh!" Harry muttered, wiping the fluid from his eyes and looking at the now upturned Pensieve with a frown, "Why did you put the pensieve there of all places? This stuff can't be healthy."_

 _Harry reached over and grabbed his wand from the bedside table. He turned back to Ginny, intending to vanish the fluid off of his wife before he froze in utter and complete shock._

 _Familiar red eyes stared widely back at him. And it was at that moment, Harry finally realised, that Ginny Potter was dead._

Creaking his neck to release some of the tension from his stiff neck and pushing that memory back for a moment, Harry walked over to his wife. Ginny had taken off her shirt and was bustling around in the kitchen in her bra and jeans. He sat down at the kitchen counter, waiting to see what she would cook up today.

The redheaded woman quietly cut off a chunk of butter from a slab and dropped it onto the sizzling pan, before pulling out the ingredients and starting on lunch.

Harry took a moment to admire the silent beauty of the woman before him, before his eyes drifted unwittingly to her bare abdomen, where an angry red stab wound at the very least few inches wide marred the perfect skin.

Unwillingly, another memory drifted slowly but surely to the front of his mind.

 _Surprisingly, it had taken him less than ten minutes and a few short spells to completely work out what had happened._

 _Tom Riddle hadn't been lying that night in the Chamber back in his second year. Ginny Weasley had died there. The diary had possessed the girl, and absorbed her entire soul in order to give Riddle a corporeal form._

 _When Harry had stabbed the diary and destroyed it, Riddle's soul had been inside Ginny Weasley, and as such had escaped destruction._

 _But something else had happened. A freak accident._

 _While Riddle's soul had accepted Ginny's body as its new container, his memories had remained in the diary. And with the destruction of the diary, and thus Riddle's memories, all that was left was the soul of Tom Riddle with no memories, stuck inside the body of a pre pubescent girl._

 _Without any memories of his own, Riddle's soul had latched on to Ginny's memories and assimilated them, taking her identity as his own._

 _So Tom Riddle had become Ginny Weasley in the most complete of ways. Loving who she loved, hating who she hated, doing what she would have done and in essence completely replacing her._

 _Until that night._

 _The pensieve had done something; what Harry did not know; but Riddle's memories had somehow recreated and reaffirmed themselves that night._

 _Dark Lord Voldemort had been reborn._

 _Struck by fear and revulsion, Harry had known that something had to be done. But he could not kill her. He could not strike down the woman he'd loved his entire life. He couldn't. So he had done something that his younger self would have found even more repulsive than flat out murder._

 _He had cast an Imperius on her and extracted an Unbreakable Vow from her, completely binding her to his will._

 _And so life had gone on, and for a few months, under Harry's iron cast will and a few eye colour changing charms, the house functioned just as normally as before. The children didn't notice a thing, and nor did anybody else._

 _It was alright, he told himself. He'd soon find a way to bring back Ginny, he told himself, as he spent weeks on end tirelessly searching for the Resurrection Stone._

 _But the precious Hallow of Death completely evaded him._

 _It was after one such unsuccessful search expedition that Harry found himself coming back home to the cottage quite late at night. The children had all fallen asleep, so Harry gently let himself in and headed to the bedroom to catch some sleep._

 _H_ _e wearily opened the door and let himself in, only to find that Ginny . . . Riddle . . . Ginny was leaning against the bed. She had somehow spelled her eyes back to their natural brown, and Harry found himself unable to look away from them, enraptured by the eyes of his long gone wife in his tired state of mind._

 _She sauntered over to him, and before he could command her to stop, closed the distance between them and started kissing him._

 _Whether this was a desperate attempt at seduction, or some more sinister ploy Harry did not know, nor did he have the time or the brainpower to think about it. He hadn't had any relief from the continuous stress and frustration in months, and what she was doing to him was more mind numbing than anything else right now._

 _So he kissed back._

 _He placed a hand against the wall to steady himself, and parted for a second to blearily look at her, only to freeze completely. Whatever charm she was using to change her eye colour must have faded away, for her eyes were as crimson as they possibly could be._

 _Harry saw red. He angrily grabbed her by her neck and pulled her up close to his face._

 _"You took her from me, you fucking bastard!" he hissed at the crimson eyed woman before he lifted her up by her throat and slammed her into the door with enough force to crack the thick wood._

 _"I am her," she hoarsely croaked back, and Harry knew that it was the truth._

 _He had never even known the real Ginny Weasley. Never taken her on a date . . . never made her smile . . . never stole a kiss from her . . . never shared a warm bed with her._ _All this time . . . it had been Riddle . . . Voldemort._

 _An ugly emotion filled his chest, as he realised that he had never been free._

 _And using that singular burst of anger and hate, Harry forced himself into action as he transfigured a pillow into a large knife, and with a giant heave, and drove it straight into her gut._

 _He wanted to stop there, but he knew he had to keep going if he wanted Voldemort gone forever._

 _Neither can live while the other survives._

 _Setting his wand to her chest, he incanted,_

 _"Avada Kedavra"_ '

It took much more effort than the last one, and it left him with a painful knot in his stomach, but Harry eventually shook off this memory too.

He quietly took the plate with the sandwich from Ginny and quickly ate it up; not without a few crumbs landing here and there; before handing it back to her, who put it in the sink before turning to him.

"Is it time?" she asked him in the same flat tone she'd asked him the question a hundred times before.

"Yes" he said, letting the same gut wrenching feeling of remorse that he felt every single day when he gave her the same answer wash over him.

"The bedroom then?"

Harry nodded in agreement, and quietly followed her to the bedroom, where he opened up the large oaken cupboard that now stood against the north facing wall. Harry gently pressed a hidden button on the side of the cupboard, and the insides slowly slid backwards into the magically expanded space as a bed rose from the floor.

Ginny walked up to the bed and lied down on it.

Harry stared at the necklace that hung around his wife's neck. The innocent looking piece of jewellery that hosted half of his own soul. The horcrux, which possessed Ginny's body and allowed the world to believe that she was alive and well for the last seven years.

He planted a small kiss on her forehead before he pulled the necklace off of her throat. She slumped into the bed . . . limp . . . lifeless . . . soulless . . .

Harry stared into her red eyes for a second. Those had never really gone away, despite his greatest efforts otherwise. Using a couple of his fingers, he closed her eyelids shut, and stepped back.

The bed had on it some of the the best preservation charms known to mankind, to make sure that Ginny's body would never deteriorate or rot. As soon as Harry stepped away from the bed, they activated with an almost inaudible hum. The bed started to slowly sink back into the floor.

Harry gazed hungrily at the peaceful face of the woman he loved for a few more torturous seconds, as if trying to memorise every single detail. It was not until a few moments later that he pulled his eyes away and closed the wooden door of the cupboard, before sealing it with a few waves of his wand.

His children needed their mother, and Harry had promised to himself that he would be a good father to his children. That he would always provide his children with whatever they needed.

No matter what the cost.


End file.
